


celestial dynamics

by liminal



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-13
Updated: 2014-06-13
Packaged: 2018-02-04 13:47:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1781272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liminal/pseuds/liminal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You have this kind of pull, like gravity. I am so lucky that I fell into your orbit."</p><p>The poetics of space, between Sherlock and Joan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	celestial dynamics

**Author's Note:**

> "Le monde est grand, mais en nous il est profound comme la mer" - R.M. Rilke
> 
> (The world is large, but in us it is deep as the sea)
> 
> "L'espace m'a toujours rendu silencieux" - Jules Valles
> 
> (Space has always reduced me to silence)

Sherlock Holmes cannot name the planets of the Solar System in order or describe how space smells. He cannot account for the length of Venus’ orbit or the number of moons that Jupiter has. He cannot enumerate the different types of cloud, cannot recall why Pluto is no longer considered a planet, cannot answer as to when Halley’s Comet will next be visible. Above all, Sherlock Holmes cannot understand why Joan describes him in a language that is beyond his comprehension. 

She compares him to gravity, says she was pulled into his orbit and is grateful for it. She makes him bigger and vaster than what he is and speaks through analogy and simile. Through boundless space, Joan makes Sherlock realise his own boundaries, realise that only a tiny portion of him is stardust; though he wonders if, maybe, that portion expands when he thinks as Joan thinks and puts scepticism and cold science to one side.

Sherlock is no fool; he is intimately familiar with gravity, aware of what an orbit is. _Orbit: the regularly repeated elliptical course of a celestial object or spacecraft about a star or planet._ But Joan speaks of space as she speaks in English and speaks in sentiment, and Sherlock is left to wonder, with his philosopher and scientist’s brain, why she compares him to a heavenly body when his atomic composition is so different from that of Neptune’s. Sherlock is still learning to communicate in English, and Joan blindsides him with astronomy. Not for the first time, space has reduced Sherlock to silence.

Joan can recite five different mnemonics for remembering the order of the planets and knows that space supposedly smells like seared steak and hot metal. She knows that Venus’ orbit takes 224.7 Earth days and that Jupiter has at least 63 known moons. She knows that clouds are divided within the mesospheric, stratospheric and tropospheric classes; that Pluto is now a ‘dwarf planet’ because of its size and composition and orbit; that Halley’s Comet will next appear some time in 2061. Above all, Joan Watson knows that space and language, both unimaginably vast and unimaginably beautiful, are equally within and beyond her comprehension. 

Her love for space is childlike, constructed around its implausibilities and possibilities; and space becomes another sphere that Joan expands into, the scientist in her never truly fading away. Space is immense and people small, but for Joan, there’s a greatness in knowing that there are more atoms in her body than stars in the universe. Everything is stardust; astronomy, for someone as cerebral and open-minded as Joan, is her mother tongue.

If Sherlock could speak with the same celestial metaphors as Joan, he’d make her understand that they aren’t planet and satellite, macro and micro; that, if anything, he revolves quite fully around her and his orbit is becoming ever more regular; that they are their own forces, pushing and pulling each other as Newton’s Third Law shapes them into a happy synchronicity. If Sherlock understood space as something other than a place of irregularities and possibilities that undermine all logic and rationale, he’d tell Joan that, if anything, he’s lucky to have found a body such as her to orbit around; that it’s only with her help that he’s starting to chart the universe inside himself.

Space, though, reduces Sherlock to silence and his galaxies of words and sentiments go unspoken.


End file.
